Lotte Kramer

For forty years what happened to Lotte Kramer was too hard to think about. She says “One knew, but memories were too painful to express.” Then she began writing poetry – and is still writing. It is a way of telling other people. “They need to know but I don’t know if they’ll learn any lessons. You get such terrible things happening now.” 

Quakers helped Lotte to escape Germany. Her teacher negotiated a place for her and five other girls on one of the last Kindertransport trains from Mainz in July 1939. She left behind a large Jewish family. She waited for years, desperately hoping for news, before finding that her parents, aunts and uncles – twelve family members in all – perished at the hands of the Nazis. Through the Red Cross she traced her parents to Poland. They had been deported to a village near some death camps; the others had been sent to Auschwitz. 

Lotte Kramer’s volumes of poems speak of her family; her father, a dramatist; of the traumatic parting from her mother; of arriving in England and those twenty-five-word Red Cross telegrams. She refers to a suitcase kept for years, “stuffed tight with mother-love and heartache.” And she writes about the unbearable time “when the ‘final solution’ became known as the unacceptable fact.” 

Exodus

For all mothers in anguish
Pushing out their babies
In a small basket 

To let the river cradle them
And kind hands find
And nurture them 

Providing safety
In a hostile world:
Our constant gratitude. 

As in this last century
The crowded trains
Taking us away from home 

Became our baby baskets
Rattling to foreign parts
Our exodus from death.

(Kindertransport, Before and After: Elegy and Celebration. Sixty Poems 1980–2007 by Lotte Kramer. Edited with an Introduction by Sybil Oldfield. Published by the Centre for German Jewish Studies, University of Sussex.)